Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.

Decentralized applications, or DApps, finally showed a glimmer of recovery in August as the daily average of unique active wallets rose by 3.7% compared to May.

With just under a week left for the Merge, SEBA Bank has opened Ethereum staking services for institutions. On the other side, layer-2 scalability solutions are hopeful of seeing a significant cut in their carbon emissions post Merge.

This past week, two DeFi protocols became victims of coordinated flash loan attacks. On Wednesday, Avalanche-based lending protocol Nereus Finance became the victim of a crafty hack that saw a user net $371,000 worth of USD Coin (USDC) using a smart contract exploit. The very next day, on Thursday, New Free DAO, a nonfungible token- (NFT)-focused project, lost nearly $1.25 million in another similar flash loan attack.

Top-100 DeFi tokens by market cap finally saw a week of green after nearly two weeks of dominant bearish price action. Most of the tokens recorded double-digit gains, with Luna Classic (LUNC) — formerly Terra (LUNA) — making an entry into the top 30 with over 100% gains in the past seven days.

DApps showed a slight recovery for the first time since May, with the daily average of unique active wallets (UAWs) increasing 3.7% on a month-over-month basis, according to a report from DappRadar.

The rise was partially driven by the Flow protocol, which rose 577% UAW due to Instagram’s support of its NFTs and the game Solitaire Blitz. On the other hand, Solana UAW shrank by 53% in August from the previous month, while transactions dropped by 68%, the